Cloud Help Desk

Customizing and working the Cloud Help Desk

Ticket table

This is your main stop in the help desk. You’ll see your tickets listed here. You can change the view to show all tickets, open tickets, tickets assigned to you, etc. by clicking the name of the current view (located in the top-left corner of the table).

You can sort by any of the column headers by clicking them, adjust the width of the columns by mousing over the bar between the headers and dragging it, or change what columns are shown by clicking the gear icon. For instance, if you only use one organization, you don’t need that column displayed, so removing it lets you make the remaining columns larger.

Ticket details

Once you’ve selected a ticket, you’ll see its details listed below the ticket table. Just click on a field to edit it. You can see custom attributes by click the More button. The Details tab will show you the contact for the ticket, any cc’d users and the dates for when it was created and last worked on as well as its due date.

When responding to a ticket, use the Public Response field to send a notification to the end-user who submitted the ticket, or click Internal Note and use the field to only notify help desk admins/techs who are following the ticket. You can also update tickets by just responding to a ticket email from the cloud help desk.

There are three status options for the help desk: Open, Closed and Waiting on User. Open and closed are pretty self-explanatory, but Waiting on User has a few things that should be mentioned. First, you’ll need to manually change the status back to Open when the user responds by clicking Resume. Also, the time on the ticket doesn’t stop while in waiting, so your stats will reflect this.

You can also merge tickets from this area. Click the arrow next to Close and select Merge into another ticket. Now choose a ticket from the list or use the text box to search for the one you want.

Change ticket’s organization

If you’ve had a ticket submitted for one organization and need to change it to another (or, more likely, you accidentally created
it for the wrong organization), it’s easy to change the organization. Just click the arrow next to the organization name in the
ticket details pane and select the new one. This will also let you merge tickets across organizations. Just change the organizations
to match, then merge away!

Categories

You can use categories to organize your tickets, but you already know what categories are. You can edit the categories available to you by clicking Settings and choosing the appropriate organization (each organization has its own settings). Now scroll down until you see Ticket Categories. Add a new one by clicking + Category. Edit the name of, or delete, a category by clicking Edit next to the entry (to delete it, you’ll then click the Remove link in the bottom-right of the pop-up). You can also choose to allow your end-users to select the category themselves or make this selection mandatory. These options are in the user portal settings on this same page.

Custom attributes

Spiceworks can keep track of plenty by default, but maybe there are some additional attributes you want to keep track of. You can use custom attributes for this. Just click Settings and choose the organization. Now scroll down to find the Custom Attributes section. Click the + Custom Attribute link to open a pop-up. Enter a name, choose the appropriate type, and, if you’re making a list type attribute, enter the values. When entering list values, you can enter something like “Please select…” as the first value so a reasonable choice is not accidentaly left there because the field was overlooked. You can also choose to display the attribute on the portal for your users to fill in, and whether or not it’s required of them to do so.

Email footer

If you’d like to customize the footer on the emails that the help desk sends to users, you can find the setting to add/edit this by clicking Settings, selecting the organization and then clicking Edit next to General. Enter the footer you’d like to have and then click Save.

Activity tab

The activity tab basically gives you a timeline of everything that has happened in your help desk. Just click the tab and there it is. Not really much else to say about this. There aren’t any settings to customize what shows or anything. It is what it is.

Notifications

You might be wondering who gets notified for what and when. Here are some guidelines:

The admin who performs an action never gets notified (by email) of the action they just took. Anyone else linked with the ticket (end-users, cc’d users, etc.) will be notified.

If multiple actions are taken in a short time, the notifications will be condensed to a single email.

Actions taken on unassigned tickets notify all admins.

Actions taken on assigned tickets will only notify the assignee. If the assignee performed the action, no notification will go out.

The end-user who submitted the ticket will only be notified when comments are added.

Help Desk Techs are only notified about tickets that are assigned to them.

You can configure who gets notified for what actions under the Notifications settings for each Organization in your cloud help desk.

Dashboard

Click the dashboard tab to see a bunch of charts and graphs showing you some stats about your help desk. You can choose the organization you want to view (or all) and the amount of time (today, 7 days, 30 days). You can see the following graphs/charts:

Ticket history & ticket churn: Both showing the number of open and closed tickets per day, shown in different manners.

Average first response time & average ticket close time: See how long it’s taking your team to respond to and finish tickets. Keep these low for happy users.

Category breakdown: See what the problem area is.

Top 5 ticket creators: See who the problems follow.

Knowledge base

The knowledge base is a great way to stockpile the IT know-how for your network in one place. Also, with access to the huge library of
how-tos on the Spiceworks Community, you might be able to share something with your fellow admins that will help all of you. You
can learn all about how to use the Cloud Help Desk Knowledge Base here.

Reports

Use the reports tab to export data about tickets or labor for a set time period.

Click Create Report.

Choose the variables from the drop-down options.

Click Run.

You’ll receive an email when your report is ready.

Use the link in the email or refresh the table and click Ready in the status for the report to download the report as either a CSV or JSON file.

Ticket rules

Ticket rules can be your best friend. You can automate a lot of your work by setting these up. To start setting these up click Settings and then Ticket Rules. You can create a single rule that applies to all organizations so the setting is not located within each organization. Then click + Add Rule to get started.

When creating rules, you need to start with what you’re wanting to accomplish. With ticket rules in the help desk cloud edition, you have the option to assign tickets or set the category, due date, priority or status (or any combination). So choose the appropriate one under Take the following actions:. If you need to add additional actions, click the link below the listing.

Now you need to enter the conditions that will trigger this to happen. Are there multiple conditions that you’re going to enter? Do you want all of these conditions to be met or should any one of them trigger the rule? Select the appropriate entry beside Match. You can trigger rules based on the category the end-user selects in the user portal (if you’ve allowed this), the organization the ticket is submitted from, or you can look for key words in the description or summary.

For example, say you’ve got a C-level employee who tends to have problems with his trackpad often (darn batteries) and gets super angry when he has to wait to use it again. You can set up a rule like the following:

This will take any email that is from the C-level (based on his email signature) and contains “trackpad” in the description, and assign it to a specific, fast person and set the priority to high.

Custom email address

If you don’t want to use the email address we gave you, we understand. You’ll need to set up incoming and outgoing separately here. Incoming
is handled simply by adding a forwarding rule to your email server. To set up a cusotm email address for outgoing messages,
navigate to your cloud help desk settings, click Edit for the general settings and enter your custom outbound email address. You need to be
careful with this, though, or your ticket replies will end up in a spam folder. You’ll need to configure your email provider’s SPF records to
prevent your notifications from being marked as spam. For more information on SPF records click here or contact your email
provider. When setting this up, you’ll want to add include:sendgrid.net.

Ignore emails

If you have regular emails that are received by your help desk and are tired of them creating tickets, you can use the ignore settings to
prevent this from happening. Just enter a regex that matches a unique identifier for the email in the appropriate field for subject, body, or
full text. Just make sure it’s unique to the problem email; you don’t want actual tickets being ignored!

Tickets Anywhere

Tickets Anywhere commands allow you to work your tickets from anywhere. Just add the command(s) to your email response to the ticket
and Spiceworks will take care of the rest. Note that these only work from admin/tech email addresses, so any end-users who are too
smart for their own good won’t be able to change their ticket up with tickets anywhere commands.